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find himself in the nuthouse, because he is required to measure the strength of his materials and design against the weight of his load."

People are subject to the same physical laws as bridges. Indeed, Leonardo da Vinci believed mechanical science the noblest. "seeing that by means of it, all animated bodies that have movement perform all their actions." Isaac Newton described the laws of motion in 1700, but not as vibrantly as does Gideon Ariel. "It doesn't matter if you lift a cow, or throw a chair, or punch your girl friend. Everything is according to Newtonian physics."

The problem, until now, has not been that we haven't believed this; it has been that too many things happen too fast for us. The sheer complexity and velocity of a javelin thrower's movement in the final quarter second before release, for example, preclude comprehension of what is going on.

Technology helps. One of the earliest uses of photography was to settle the turn-of-the-century question of whether all four hooves of a galloping horse ever were off the ground at once (they are). In the 1930s, high-speed cameras provided slow-motion photography to offer a clearer view of the action. Dozens of limb and body parts accelerating and decelerating could be seen and measured and charted against one another. Patterns of successful athletes began to appear.

"The better the athlete, the more sophisticated his timing," says Ariel. "The one basic principle of all sports-hitting or kicking balls, punching, throwing, jumping, breaking karate bricks-is a coordinated summation of forces."

But so delicate are the relationships between an athlete's many moving parts that they cannot be assessed simply by looking at the slowest of motion pictures. A process of frame-by-frame, body segment-by-body segment analysis is necessary to make optimum use of cinematography, work that is painstaking, dreary and absurdly time-consuming. Gideon Ariel gave that work to the computer and suddenly the maddening complexity of

human motion could be matched by the awesome memory and speed of the machine. Well, not quite suddenly. It took Ariel some 10,000 hours over seven years to create the programs that instruct his computers. Now he offers the sporting

world a chance to lift itself from, as he puts it. "the dark ages, a witchcraft business where everything is made of thin air." Over those years, Ariel transformed himself as well, from a carefree discus thrower to a compelling. caprizant lig

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